Inspired by Insiders – Upgrade Analytics

Many of our Windows Insiders are IT Pros who are evaluating Windows 10 for deployment in their organizations. Before rolling the OS out broadly, they want to ensure their applications and drivers are ready. And, we want to help them be successful, so we worked together and came up with Upgrade Analytics, a new cloud-based service built on the Microsoft OMS (Operations Management Suite) platform.

With Windows 10 Microsoft has delivered a highly compatible operating system. The majority of commercial apps just work or mitigations are available. IT Pros told us they need a complete inventory of the applications deployed in their organizations as well as information about known compatibility problems and actionable guidance on how to solve them.

Based on the feedback from Windows Insiders and customers, we built a set of upgrade readiness insights and validated that they help reduce the complexity of the upgrade process. Over several iterations we refined and expanded the set of insights and built a workflow which guides IT Pros through the upgrade project.

These insights and workflow are now available for free to all customers through Upgrade Analytics, a new cloud-based service built on the Microsoft OMS (Operations Management Suite) platform. The service paradigm allows us to provide new capabilities quickly.

Information about known application and driver issues, as well as guidance on how to mitigate them

A way to track whether an application or driver is ready for a Windows 10 upgrade

Per-computer readiness information that can be used to makes decisions which computers are ready for Windows 10 deployments

In order to generate the application and driver inventory, we use opt-in data sent by client computers. In addition to application and driver inventory information, the data also includes information about Microsoft known issues with applications and drivers.

For Upgrade Analytics, we provide detailed documentation about the client data required to generate the compatibility insights. This allows IT Pros to have a dialogue with their security and compliance counterparts about the data that drives Upgrade Analytics.

The insights from the Upgrade Analytics service also allow Microsoft to understand and address the common pain points in the enterprise ecosystem. One example of this is the recently launched Ready for Windows catalog, which provides information about the adoption of applications in the commercial ecosystem. The Ready for Windows catalog also contains information about applications which are supported on Windows 10 by Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). This data can be correlated with Upgrade Analytics inventory data in order to allow IT Pros to see supportability insights in addition to compatibility insights.